January 10, 2023

What the Research says

  • Erigha (2015) finds that despite overall trends towards diversification, blockbuster movies have seen a decrease in female protagonists.

  • Lindner, Lindquist, and Arnold (2015) assess that the trend has worsened since the early 2000s.

Investigating the Trend over Time using the IMdB Database

Modeling the Trend over Time

\[ \begin{aligned} ln(Budget_i) &= \beta_0 + \beta_1Time + \beta_2Gender_i + e_i \\ Budget_i &= e^{\beta_0 + \beta_1Time + \beta_2Gender_i + e_i} \end{aligned} \]

Modeling the Trend over Time using R

# the code fits a regression line per group
reg <- lm(budget_log ~ year_1980 * gender_main_chr, data=data)

Female Actors are indeed increasingly discriminated against

## 
## Call:
## lm(formula = budget_log ~ year_1980 * gender_main_chr, data = data)
## 
## Residuals:
##     Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
## -6.1635 -0.5098  0.0843  0.6757  2.3035 
## 
## Coefficients:
##                           Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
## (Intercept)               16.42179    0.05477 299.844  < 2e-16 ***
## year_1980                  0.33910    0.02381  14.244  < 2e-16 ***
## gender_main_chr           -0.05272    0.11573  -0.456  0.64878    
## year_1980:gender_main_chr -0.14885    0.04680  -3.180  0.00149 ** 
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## Residual standard error: 0.9939 on 2120 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared:  0.111,  Adjusted R-squared:  0.1098 
## F-statistic: 88.27 on 3 and 2120 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16

Displaying the Trend visually

Figure 1: Increase in Movie Production Budgets over Time by Gender (interactive view)

Interpreting the Results

  • The data supports previous research findings.
  • Over time, the gap in movie production budgets between genders has worsened.

References

Erigha, Maryann. 2015. “Race, Gender, Hollywood: Representation in Cultural Production and Digital Media’s Potential for Change.” Sociology Compass 9 (1): 78–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12237.

Lindner, Andrew M., Melissa Lindquist, and Julie Arnold. 2015. “Million Dollar Maybe? The Effect of Female Presence in Movies on Box Office Returns.” Sociological Inquiry 85 (3): 407–28. https://doi.org/10.1111/soin.12081.